As Congress gets back to wrangling over the federal budget, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee has called on the National Endowment for the Humanities to explain its peer-review process and justify grants it makes to study questions like “What is the meaning of life?”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, also challenged the agency to explain a grant program that provides resources about global Muslim cultures to libraries and state humanities councils.
Mr. Sessions laid out his concerns in a letter sent this week to Carole M. Watson, the agency’s acting chair. He gave her until November 25 to respond.
A spokeswoman for the agency said on Wednesday evening that the letter had come as a “complete surprise” and that Ms. Watson had not yet received it. “We are working to answer the questions in his press release as rapidly as possible,” Judith Havemann, the agency’s director of communications, said via e-mail.
The humanities endowment has long been a favorite target for some members of Congress. Mr. Sessions noted in his letter that the U.S. House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee “has proposed to cut NEH funding by almost 50 percent"—$71-million—for the 2014 fiscal year.
“I affirm the value of the humanities, but we all recognize that care and discipline must be exercised by any government agency that decides to favor certain projects over others,” Mr. Sessions wrote. “Recent NEH expenditures raise questions about whether the endowment is meeting this requirement.”
Concern Over ‘Muslim Journeys’
Mr. Sessions asked for a detailed explanation of the process behind the NEH’s Muslim Journeys grants. “One would think that the NEH takes a fair and balanced approach to promoting culture,” the senator wrote. He asked for “an itemized list,” covering the last five years, “of all spending related to Christianity (e.g., Protestantism—Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal—or Catholicism) or Judaism where books or forums promoting one point of view were provided to libraries, etc.”
Mr. Sessions also asked Ms. Watson “to explain the peer-review process” and provide lists of peer reviewers for all education-program grants disbursed after April 30, 2013. “In the current fiscal environment, I question the appropriateness of such grants, and believe the public would benefit from a fulsome explanation of the entire review process,” he wrote.
The letter names several specific education-program grants (about $25,000 each) and the general topics they support—for instance, “What is belief?” and “What is a monster?” It does not mention that the grants go to scholars to develop and teach undergraduate courses centered on those topics. According to the NEH’s Web site, the Enduring Questions program supports “question-driven” courses that encourage students and professors “to grapple with a fundamental concern of human life addressed by the humanities, and to join together in a deep and sustained program of reading in order to encounter influential thinkers over the centuries and into the present day.”
‘Gold Standard’ in Grant Making
Stephen Kidd is executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, which represents some 120 universities, scholarly societies, and other groups with a stake in the humanities.
“Congress has oversight of these agencies and can ask questions of them, and I’m not worried that NEH won’t be able to answer these questions satisfactorily,” Mr. Kidd said. “I am concerned about the lack of full engagement with the subject matter itself.” For instance, to talk about NEH programs like Muslim Journeys as promoting one culture over another is “a kind of fundamental miscasting of the type of work that’s being done in these programs,” he said.
The NEH’s peer-review process should be able to withstand Congressional scrutiny, according to Mr. Kidd. The NEH has “a very well respected and very thorough peer-review process,” he said. “Its grants are notoriously competitive. They’re the gold standard” in humanities research.
He added, “These decisions are not being made by bureaucrats in Washington. These decisions are being made by people in institutions around the country who know the work and the substance.”
